House of Many Gods (35 page)

She read the letter again, more carefully, picturing Anahola approaching her father, whom she had not seen in over thirty years. Ana felt she was looking in on such a private moment, she closed her eyes imagining her mother as a young girl, unloved, and banished to an arid coast.
What would it be like to be so reduced? To have so little left?

For years she had wondered, by what genetic predisposition, what skid marks on her DNA, her mother had been able to abandon
her
in return, to exempt herself from moral responsibility. But then Ana thought how, through the years, each letter served to remind her that she had never actually felt the absence of the woman’s love, only of her presence. She would never quite understand her, would always be somewhat intimidated by her. Still, this woman had a claim on her.
She’s in my blood. She
is
my blood
.

Ana folded the letter, and sighed. In the dark, a soft breeze buffeted her shoulders and her cheeks. Tides in her body shifted. Something accumulated in her veins and in her nerves. She thought of her mother’s recent visit and how Ana had scrupulously avoided her. Avoided introducing her to Niki. She imagined how her mother would have silently appraised him—his shabby clothes, imperfect English—with inscrutable reserve. How, with a glance, she would have diminished him.

Which, somehow, would diminish me
.

N
OW THERE WERE NIGHTS WHEN HE SAT UP FIGHTING FOR BREATH
, a distinct rattle in his inhalations. On such nights she gathered him to her like a child, wanting to drag him into her lungs and breathe for him. Wanting to rescue him, and heal him. One night they sat like that till dawn. And, feeling the profound beneficence of her arms, Niki began to talk.

“I have said that if I told you everything, you would want to shoot me out of kindness. But now, whatever happens, I want you to know who is this man who loves you … I did not tell you about Irini, my first love. A circus girl from the region of Kazakhstan. She came from one of the villages I filmed and, like many of these children, she was born deaf. Even now I wonder how can aerialist be deaf? Hearing controls our balance.”

He described how he had first seen Irini at the Moscow Circus, a small, exquisite creature glittering above the crowds.

“It may be she relied on something else for balance. Maybe molecules in the air. Maybe ancient gods, for she soared like an angel.”

“How long were you together?” Ana asked.

“One moment. Forever. Who can measure such things? Irini was my wife. Now, I will tell you how she died. Come close. Put your head here on my chest and close your eyes.”

His voice low, Niki recounted in great detail how they had fallen in love and married. And how he gave up his life of “roofing” and filming so Irini could continue traveling with the circus, soaring above the crowds
who loved her. How he had worked odd jobs, even as a clown, to be with her. He spoke of their passion together—life lived in pantomine. And how they had dreamed and hoped—a child, one day a little house.

“Now I understand that those dear moments of wishing, planning, hoping … that is the happiness.”

He described her cough, how she had miscarried their child, and how in time they were forced to leave the circus. Sawdust had infected her weak lungs. He recounted the night of the honeybees, the “little winged prophets,” how they flew in through a window and settled in Irini’s hair.

“I remember their glittering wings, her hair full of tiny stars of midnight blue. I knew then, she would die. In one cloud, they flew away and took her soul.”

In the stillness Ana heard herself swallow.

“One winter day she could no more eat, no more breathe. So thin, she seems transparent. Such pain, she beg me take her life, and make it mine.”

He explained about hospitals in Russia then, live patients disappearing, the human-organ ghouls. He would not let this happen to Irini. And so he had carried her to a field blanketed in snow. He had undressed her and laid her naked there.

“I kneel and sing old circus songs to her. For this she smiles, then very slowly she turns blue. My tears drop down, turn to crystals on her chest. Then I build a fire. I carry Irini there and gently feed her childlike limbs to flames. And I watch over her, a day, a night, until she is just smoke and wind that soars. She will always soar …”

He turned to Ana, his face devoid of emotion.

“Maybe then I died. I do not know. But after many months, I decide to live again. To look at life again, try to record it. So I have continued. For her. For you. For some kind of human future.”

For days Ana moved in a kind of stupor, images of the girl, Irini, haunting her. She wondered how Niki had survived such loss, how he had carried on.

S
HE BEGAN TO BE AWARE OF TIME
. H
IS YEAR AT THE
E
AST-WEST
Center would soon end. He would have to return to Russia. He grew less active, more reflective. One night he sat her down again.

“Forgive me if my story made you sad. Time blunts pain. We live again, learn to feel again. I have given this much thought. And what I
think is this: Each of us has one love in our life that haunts us. One love that died, or one that walked away, because love was not possible. I used to wonder, what is the good of this? Why have emotions at all if we are crushed so terribly? Now I think there is good reason for this love that breaks us. It teaches us humility, makes us better humans, preparing us for who comes next.”

She sat quiet, thinking of Lopaka.

“Why I am saying this? Because Irini’s death prepared me for
you
. It taught me deep humility, I see that now. So, Ana, whatever happens, there is something more I need to tell you.”

She took him by the shoulders. “Niki. Nothing is going to happen. You’re going to get well and live. What are you making this film for, if not for your future. For all our futures.”

“But just in case … I need to tell you something more.”

“What more?”

“I need to confess that … I am serious liar. Very Russian thing. We lie in order to survive. For us, this is an art. After Irini, I became pathological liar. Was thrilling! Bending reality to implausible extremes. Each day new life, new name. Was better than old days of gangsterhood.”

He took her hands and squeezed them. “Do you understand? Telling lies brought back sensation to my nerve ends. Feelings of euphoria, like drugs. I was this new man, born of lies, then topping them with better lies! Look. Even, I am here at East-West Center as a hoax, a lie.”

She leaned back slightly. “You mean the things you told me, things you said while we made love …”

“No, Ana! All of that is true. I did not lie in my deep feelings for you. Or what I told you of Irini’s death. But much of the rest … my mother was not celebrated actress. My poor father, not decorated hero of the war. Please listen. Let me say the truth, so you will know.

“When World War II begins my mother was a nurse. But with this strange, asymetrical face. One eye lower, one nostril lower. Like two mismatched halves from strangers. When wounded soldiers see her face, they faint, thinking death has come. Doctors banish her from hospital. During Siege of Leningrad, nine hundred days of bombing by Germans, she was sent to Street Services Corps, dodging bombs, running errands back and forth across city. Running bandages and blood, even food to basement of Hermitage Museum …

“This the way how she met my father, who was carpenter. Poor peasant, his feet so flat he walked on insides of his ankles. Could not march, could not fit in military boots. So. Army train him to build artificial artillery
to fool German spy planes. With planks, plywood, papier-mâché, he and hundreds of carpenters build warships, tanks, painting them gray. They build wooden heads and painted faces and stand them up in ‘tanks.’ They build entire artificial battle scenes. From the air such battles, tanks, and ships look
real
. Our armies and artilleries look massive. That’s the way how we saved our city from Germans. With magic! And so my father
was
hero in a way …”

He told Ana how one day on the street, his mother was wounded by flying shrapnel, and how his father dragged her into the basement of the Hermitage Museum. He had been sent there to help build wooden crates, for here were hundreds of curators and restorers hiding priceless works of art. And so Niki’s mother stayed there with her bandaged leg. They lived by candlelight.

“And it may be that in such flickering light, bombs exploding around them, my mother becomes beautiful. Maybe in her face, my father sees his feet. This allows them their humanity. And so they fall in love midst Rembrandts, Tintorettos, starving curators eating glue from bottles, eating their own shoes. In basement of Hermitage they begin to stack the dead. When my father goes back to build more artificial tanks along Neva River, my mother follows him …

“This is their true story, swear to God! A nurse whose face could kill wounded soldiers. A carpenter who built toy tanks to fight a war. But even then—where tens of thousands perished from starvation, food supplies cut off, coldest winter in two hundred years—even then, there was sorrowful majesty and beauty …”

Niki took Ana’s hands.

“Imagine fabled onion-domed cathedrals. The Hermitage, and Winter Palace, bombed but still intact. This fairy-tale city covered in ice, then snow, then upon that, ice again. A city so cold and deep in ice, it glows. Like Japanese vase that glows from depths of eighteen layers of resin …

“Leningrad. People so weak they dump refuse and excrement from shattered windows. Buildings became streaked with mounds of waste frozen down their sides. In time, new snow covers this awful slop so it becomes like ruffles of frosting on gigantic cake. Buildings now blurred and lost their edges. Great city floated like a dream. Then light hit ice covering the snow, and all of Leningrad turned blue! …”

He described how humans grew pale, transparent, so they too turned greenish blue. How they dragged sleds with pots and pans, searching for water, and even these turned blue. Immobilized streetcars, buses stood
like blue whales, cast ashore in snowdrifts. At night when the full moon shone on the Neva River, the Winter Palace, former home of the Tsars, and the Hermitage, their beautiful museum, all stood intact on the river’s embankment, snowed under, frozen blue. Like a mythical sleeping dragon.

“Most ghostly were huge battleships immobilized in ice on frozen Neva. Real Russian battleships, not my father’s cardboard toys. Summer so short, nothing thawed. They sat for three years, moaning like prehistoric monsters. People beside them, stabbing at ice for water, their dying cries echoing like choruses. Even light round those ships was choral …”

As if stepping from a dream, Ana gently interrupted him. “But, Niki, you weren’t born yet. How do you remember all of this?”

He shrugged. “Ah, but life does not just stop and start, it is a thing in continuity, always in progression, no? I
was
there, in my parents’ genes.

“I watched through my mother’s eyes as she ran through burning streets, dodging bombs and shrapnel. I felt broken glass and rubble underfoot. I remember coldness of the nails my father hammered into wood, making artificial tanks. I see mouths emerging as he painted faces on dummy soldiers, using his own blood to rouge their cheeks, glittering light from frozen Neva almost blinding him …

“And I remember city was grisly, cut off from the world. Germans had surrounded us. For three years no one did bathe—scurvy, typhus everywhere. And horrible hunger. All pets, even rodents, disappeared. The starving eyed the newly dead, tender-fleshed corpses of children …”

Niki glanced at her, then lowered his eyes.

“Yes, Ana, there was this man with red shawl who bargained with my mother. Yes, I dream of him. There were many men with shawls, full of the unspeakable. People dragged themselves to barter at place called Hungry Market. Here were ‘sausages,’ ‘meat patties’ sold by pink-cheeked, bright-eyed vendors. Yes, one does such things to live …”

Then one day they heard sirens. Russian soldiers came on tanks. After three years, the Germans had withdrawn, defeated. Niki explained how it was almost too late. Leningrad was an open grave. People had no flesh, neither the dead nor the living.

“This what I remember, blinking skulls, walking sticks. Nonetheless, they thought they had survived, my father and mother. That they would have future together. Now carpenters were ordered to tear down all artificial wooden ships and tanks, and burn them. My father was carpenter, yes, but great lover of trees. One day he carelessly passed judgment. All trees they had felled for lumber for toy tanks, toy soldiers, were a waste,
he said. ‘Tragic waste.’ These two words sentence him to death. He was denounced as traitor. Dangerous subversive. Stalin’s paranoia killed more millions than Germans ever did.…”

Niki bent forward, shaking his head.

“They sent my father to nightmare place up near Barents Sea, below Arctic circle. A
gulag
called Archangel’sk. Stalin already sent two million
kulaks
here to die. Though west of Ural Mountains, was bleak, forbidding as Siberia …